The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

December 9, 2012

Oswald Egger

Oswald
Egger [b. Italy/Austria]

1963

Born in Lana, Italy on March 7, 1963, Oswald Egger
graduated from the University of Vienna. He currently divides his time between
Vienna and Hombroich, Germany.

His first book of poetry and theatrical
works was Der Erne der Rede,
published in 1993. Gleich und gleich
followed in1995, a year in which he won the Austrian “Staatstipendium” for
Literature, an award he was again awarded in 2001.

The following year, upon the publication
of Blauberts Treue, he received a
stipend for the Stuttgart School of Solitude. Juli, Steptember, August was published in 1997. And with the
publication of Herde de Rede in 1999,
he was awarded the Mondsee Poetry Award. To
Observe the Obverse won him a George Saiko Award and the Brentano Award.

In 2000 he was Artist in Residence at the
Chinati-Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the following year he was Writer in
Residence at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. Nichts,
das ist, followed in 2001, and over the past few years Egger has continued
to publish new volumes of poetry and prose collections, including

In
the creeping darkness, epicure-animals, who bloom in the glimmer-walls and
calibrate first floors, scan-bridge-gauge pump-baths, where leafless plants
thrive and the overflow keeps to rotation, Bakelite-houses rafters, informer
wing-creatures, air tumbler tunnels whirring alarms, fluttering, pixels in the
x-arbitrary (an bury themselves under hollows).

(from
Nichts, das is, 2001)

—Translated from the German by Michael
Pissaro

I
am saluted, fields, as non-foamed

deserts,
crumble-piles pointed wool-lines, pebble rifts

and,
blurring, moss-posts of the fore-spaced

the
bloom-spatula up

on
hill-flagelliforms with their stick-palm-

ferns
moon-bristles corollary and cilia-muzzles,

new
world-hood-plait like these so-called ornimals and

gazellepedes,
lash-tassels and

stiff-spikelets
from blue lilies, shift-seaweed in the

whirlpool
wrist of nostril whales snort-funnels and the

split
pin lapping glow-green and grind-teeth of the

eye-animals,
white nesting and

Sometimes,
when the sun is sunken under ground, gleam-lights, one round the other, is
themselves self-capsizing inflaming, fields, huff-bow, and falling rustle-leaf
deception, garrison gangways of fore-wall fortifications, holy-grain screen
instantaneous incomprehensible glug-images appeared the trickle flarings, hard
shadows shimmer in the bare bared wire (land). I am astounded sighting a
thousand corrugated iron waves, the rivers of traffic in the fortress network
of freeway-lines viaduct-stumps—and unto the traffic-tide I shall return.—